"She's been telling me quite a lot about _you_." "Has she? What?" "That you know all about the harbor these days." "Sue's wonderful," Eleanore murmured. "She's so sure her friends know everything." "Let's stick to the harbor." "All right, let's. I know enough about it to like it. Sue says you know enough to hate it. I wonder which of us knows more." "I do." "How do you know you do?" "Because I've been here longer," I said. "I've hated it for twenty odd years." She looked at me with interest. Her eyes were not at all like Sue's. Sue's eyes were always wrapped up in herself; Eleanore's in somebody else. They were as intimate as her voice. "Don't you remember the evening when you took me down to the docks?" she asked. "I do--very well," I said. "And do you mean to tell me you didn't like the harbor then?" "I do--I hated the harbor then. I was scared to death that Sam and his gang would appear around the end of a car." "Who was Sam?" she asked me. "He sounds like a very dreadful small boy." Soon she had me telling her of Sam and his gang and the harbor of thrills, from the time of old Belle and the Condor. "I was a toy piano," I said. "And the harbor was a giant who played on me till I rattled inside. We had a big spree together." "Not a very healthy spree, was it?" she said quietly, turning her gray-blue eyes on mine. For some reason we suddenly smiled at each other. "You're a good deal like your father--aren't you?" she said. "The same nice twinkle in your eyes. Please go on. What did the harbor do to you next?" I thought all at once of the August day when she had lain, a girl of twelve, in the fragrant meadow beside me. And as then, so now, the drunken woman's image rose for an instant in my mind. "It wiped the thrills all out," I said abruptly. I told how the place grew harsh and bare, how I could always feel it there stripping everything naked like itself, and how finally when later in Paris I felt I had shaken it off for life, it had now suddenly jerked me back, let me see what my father had really been, and had then repeated its same old trick, closing in on his great idea and making it look like an old man's hobby, crowding him out and handing us grimly two dull little jobs--one to live on and one to die on. "It's getting monotonous," I ended. While I talked she had been watching it, now a bustling ferry crossing, now a tug with a string of barges working up against the tide. "How do you know it's so bad for you to be brought back from Paris?" she asked me, without looking around. "Have you ever been in Paris?" "Yes--and I want to go again. But I don't believe it will ever feel as real to me as this place does. And I shouldn't think it would to you. Because you were born here, weren't you--and you've been so close to it most of the time that you're all mixed into it, aren't you? I mean you've got your roots here. Why don't you write about _them_ for a while?" "What?" "Your roots."